The Heartbreak Boys of Coogee Beach

There were three bombs that October night in Bali: The first exploded near the U.S. Consulate in Denpasar, meant only to signal who was being targeted. The second was strapped to the body of a young Muslim from Java who approached a place called Paddy's Pub in Kuta and walked through the door, went directly to the dance floor, white robes flowing among barely clad tourists, and detonated himself.

Across the street at that exact moment, a van packed with 1,500 pounds of explosives stalled out in front of a bigger nightspot, the Sari Club, which was thrumming with loud music and laughter. The club's security guards motioned and yelled at the driver to move along. Seconds later, the van discharged with such force that it left a moon crater on the charred spot where it had just been.

The blast gutted the Sari Club, and its thatched roof caught fire, disintegrating overhead. Those still alive were shrieking, trying to escape a downpour of flames. Some unburied themselves from the rubble and broke free. In the ensuing chaos, bystanders pulled badly burned, half-recognizable people from the fire. When the heat became too intense, the rescuers retreated and stood before the pyre, shielding their eyes like so many useless statues. Later, the dead were added up: 202 souls blown from the lattice of their bodies and set loose in glimmers.

Gerard, you'd been with the boys, eleven Coogee Dolphins, eleven regular blokes from an Australian footie team on the postseason trip to paradise. You were drinking the Sari Club's famous Jungle Juice out in a little beer garden in the front of the club, then you wandered inside to the bar. Patty floated by, put an arm around you, enveloped you: Mates. The music was pounding, everything opening in a new, exotic way. You were a kid the first time away from his home country. Your first plane ride. Your first hotel room. Your first adventure out in the world, breathing it all in. One moment you were standing there and then, the next, you weren't.

Even now, two years later, the boys wonder: Where in that ashen night did you go?

It always comes round again: the beginning of rugby season. At the end of summer, light lifts through the air, a cool sundown on a green field. A full moon zooms from a thicket of trees; a plane arcs overhead, leaving its contrailed hieroglyphics. The boys of the Coogee Dolphins footie team are silhouettes at dusk, and fading.

Shorty's back, of course—the old man at 34. Most are out of the game by their late twenties—ripped knees, ruined shoulders, the plain fear that settles in after stupid youth—but Shorty, all five eight of him, with spiked, sun-bleached hair and that chesty, tough-guy walk, with that lucky chain around his neck, wants to make it to 40, playing footie.

Brock is here again, too—this year's team captain and enforcer, who sports a dark crew cut and Popeye biceps. For an easy bloke with a quick smile and the slightest lazy eye, he's all piston and pummel. In his footie career, Brock has had his right leg broken three times, twice by his older brother, Clint. And now that Clint's gone, he takes those two as an honor.

There are others who hang on from before the bombing—Bucko, Dino, Toby, Moonie, Ginzie—all with their Dolphin tattoos bearing the team insignia and the numbers of the dead: 6, 10, 5, 8, 3, 4. There is a coterie of trainers, water runners, and supporters who fill the stands on Sundays. But besides the dead, there are the conspicuous absences.

For one, there's Paul—your own brother, Gerard. He's down with a bum shoulder. But not just that: Since your death, his smile comes off more like a wince. He admits he's lost some heart for the game, but part of it is simply that in a sport that demands fearlessness he now has fear, or perhaps he no longer has the faith or energy to trust his luck.

And then there's Patty: Patty, who left the club sixty seconds before the bomb went off; Patty, who was the last one to put an arm around you, Gerard; Patty, whose joy and silliness on the piss sometimes make him the most agreeable pain in the ass in the whole Southern Hemisphere. If the Coogee Dolphins had one bloke who was a composite for the whole team, that'd be Patty.

But now, on this emerald pitch at sunset, the boys are finding out what all that off-season beer has wrought. The new coach—a big, bulky ex-player in his late twenties, nicknamed the Chief—is determined to whip the boys into shape. He announces that there'll be some running tonight...and then some more. The boys grudgingly line up, the steel bit slipped in.

"Gentlemen, it's time to meet your lunch," says one of the blokes. A whistle bleats and they're off, a thundering herd. After a few up and backs, the runners are heaving, hands on knees, faces red. The stragglers simply lock themselves to the heels of the man in front and try to hang on.

After practice, the team gathers around Mal, a short, thick, balding man who's the club secretary. "Look," he says, rapidly chewing gum, "it's a big game this weekend out in Wagga. One for the boys. The bus'll leave the Palace at eight-thirty and not eight-thirty-one. Let's go out there and play like hell, but don't be cock heads. You can get blinding ripped afterward, you can fall down and mess yourself, but don't be cock heads...and don't tear up your rooms!"

As he speaks, some of the guys spin forties up in the air and catch them, then relaunch them skyward, grinning; some hoof the ground, already playing in their minds, and the rest listen solemnly.

It's funny, Gerard, the boys don't talk about you and the others who died that much anymore. You're always there, hovering, but a lot of the blokes who are here now came in after you, because of you, to pick the Dolphins up and help them carry on as a team. They read about the Dolphins in the papers or heard about them on television or from friends, and they came out, silently appeared at the start of last season and then reappeared this season. The huddle just got bigger. And then, for some, it's not just the enormity of having no words to say—and no way of explaining—but it's inbred, an outback Aussie hardness. The boys are orange rock and dry gully, expression-less in the face of grief.

But this is how they try: a bus, thirty mates, five hours out into the country, to Wagga Wagga for a memorial game in your honor, and then afterward everyone on the piss, up all night and through the next day, drinking, singing, dancing, looking for a start with someone somewhat attractive, laughing their asses off, and of course, nudie runs. This is how they try.

It seems the best they can do for you now anyhow.

Gerard, can you remember back to those days leading up to Bali, to a conversation with your brother Paul? The postseason trip had been announced, guys were committing, and you'd been saving, had set your mind on going. But Paul was against it.

He had a bit of work on, his wife was seven months pregnant, and he told you: Pancake, we'll go in a few months' time—together. A year earlier, you'd moved from home—from the country town of Dubbo, five hours northwest of Sydney—into the flat where Paul and his wife lived. You went to work as an apprentice for the plumbing company that Paul owned. All day long, he showed you how to snake clogged toilets and install pipes, and then afterward, at home, he was still the boss. One of your best traits, Gerard, was that you never wanted to put anyone out, but you could still be a stubborn bloke, and you said, "You can't tell me what to do. I'm going." And click, that was it.

Click, and you had the ticket.

Click, you were packing.

When Paul realized there was no changing your mind, he made a few calls, to warn some of the boys that you couldn't always handle your booze, that after a few drinks you became a roamer, and the boys promised to keep a close eye on you. He made you sign a pledge that you would behave yourself. Well, there were two pledges, actually. One that was really funny, with a bit of racy language about all the racy things you most definitely weren't going to do, and the clean version, for your family, that you took from him and rewrote. You wrote, "I will do nothing to harm my family."

It's funny now to remember: When you got your ticket, you thought you were headed to Garuda. Garuda sure was going to be fun. Garuda was going to be a tropical paradise. But Garuda doesn't exist: It's the name of an airline. That's how innocent you were. That's how 20.

At the airport, Paul gave you a reminder: "Stick with your own blokes, okay, Gerard? When you get to the drunk stage, stick with your blokes." Love, especially between brothers, isn't a word but a certain carefulness.

Once you made it to your hotel—the Bounty—Shorty hit the pool bar, sitting up to his belly in water, ordering bourbon after bourbon. A few of these, drunk in the hot sun, were enough to take you there. But Shorty never drinks just two. In fact, the first two were merely the start of a twenty-two-hour binge that would save his life.

You know, some of the boys thought Shorty had a bit of a chip on his shoulder before the bombing. He could be a difficult bloke, unwilling to back down from anyone—as perhaps few have stood up for him in his life—but maybe it's that he's a paradox, a loner who loves people, a bloody charming bloke who can turn on a dime. Underneath lurks that kid abandoned at birth by his mother and given up for adoption. Underneath is, How could she have?

But now Shorty settled in for his all-nighter, drink after drink—and he was still sitting there the next morning on the same barstool. That next day, a Saturday, everyone was in and out of the pool, playing Ping-Pong, to their rooms and back. This was as you had imagined it: the tropical sun warming your skin, palm fronds clattering in a breeze, the laid-back, lotion-scented, everything-is-yours vibe of Bali, thousands of miles from any responsibility.

This was your Garuda, Gerard. Click, you were living it.

That night, dinner was planned for 8 p.m. Five guys piled in one cab and six in the other, then the caravan was off down the lane, a right on the main drag, Jalan Legian, through thick traffic of Kuta—families on mopeds, lorries carrying bananas, visions of pretty Balinese girls. The boys took their time at dinner, might have sat there all night to have more drinks and dessert. Each one of them stood up and said what he loved most about being a Dolphin—short, slightly awkward speeches about being mates, about feeling like a family—and Gerard, you said the best thing about being a Dolphin was playing with your brother Paul, who was like your best friend and father wrapped in one.

Afterward, everyone sat for a while, sated, content in the moment. But Patty got antsy to go. He led the hard charge to the Sari Club. Later, he would regret it, of course—and blame himself for all the bad things that followed. But now he got the boys up and moving. The night was limitless. Who knew what was out there at this very moment—and why wait to find out?

So, to the Sari by sometime around ten, everyone with a half-liter knockout punch of Jungle Juice in hand. After twenty-two hours of drinking, Shorty drank one more and then weaved toward the door, buried for the night. Always the last to give up a party, he was the first to go, an endless walk back to the hotel, though really only a quarter mile or so, past a shop where earlier he'd bought the silver chain that he now wore round his neck, the one on which his mother's wedding ring was strung. Along the way, he passed a brunette with beautiful eyes, what the boys call a "glamour." She smiled, and if Shorty could have, he would have turned back, just to walk in her suburbs awhile. But he was done. When he finally got to the room he was sharing with Patty, he fell on the bed and passed out before he hit the pillow.

It wasn't only Shorty. Ellie, one of the other blokes, was blithering, and so Erik—who was a team sponsor and, at 43, the oldest on the trip—helped him back to the hotel. Then Keffo did the cutaway. Right about 11:08, the instigator himself, Patty, stumbled out the front door toward the lane. Which left five Dolphins sitting on the patio of the Sari Club, not under the thatched roof but in that open beer garden at the front, nearest the street, where you could sit up on the wall and watch everyone pass. There was Clint Thompson, Brock's older brother; Adam Howard, Shorty's best mate; Dave Mavroudis, the winger and treasurer for the team; Shane Foley, who had nearly canceled because he couldn't imagine five days apart from his fiancée; and Josh Iliffe, a handsome player dangerous around women.

Gerard, at this moment, no one knew where you were: roaming as predicted by your brother, back inside to the bar or to watch the dancing or to pee. But that's when a commotion came from across the street, at a nearby pub, and a van stalled in front of the Sari. There was yelling and laughter and then, all at once, a force lifting bodies through the air.

Gerard, do you remember again what Paul said about the drunk part, about sticking with your blokes? Well, you didn't stick with your blokes, Gerard. When the bomb went off, you were on your own.

It's a counting game. The boys are being totaled as they board: 28...29...30! The Dolphins' team manager and mother hen, Dean Lavery, stands by the door of a full bus at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning in front of the Palace Hotel at Coogee Beach. "A fucking feat," he says to the bus driver, a rough-looking tattooed softie named Richard. "They're all on the bus. You know how it is when you get a bunch of blokes together. They're like girls. They forget about time."

The ride to Wagga Wagga is five hours, Lavery filling the air with his thoughts on everything from real estate to Australia's participation in World War II. Sydney disappears within the first hour, and the land flattens a little with each mile, past Fairy Hole Creek and the turn for Tumbarumba and some unknown roadside attraction known as Dog on Tuckerbox. Crows gather under gum trees, and the greenery is slowly daubed away until only the hot, dry lunar interior of Australia radiates in the sun. Some of the boys partake in a cooler of drinks set on one of the front seats, while the Chief works on his starting lineup and figures his reserves. The whole way, Stocky, one of the team's trainers, catches flack because he's oh-for-seven-weeks in the female department, and not for lack of trying. "I was close," he says, "three weeks ago."

For a second year, the Dolphins are playing a memorial against the Wagga Wagga Magpies, a country team for which one of the deceased, Dave Mavroudis, also played, prior to becoming a Dolphin. The game is scheduled to be played before a professional match that brings a slow trickle of thousands to the bleachers and the low bluffs surrounding the pitch. The boys unload from the bus, sling their duffels over shoulders, and file through a crowd that will soon scream for their total disassembly.

In the locker room, the lightheartedness evaporates, replaced by nervousness and a slight gurgle of nausea: guys pee and yawn and slap each other, trying to get geed up; some talk to themselves, saying little prayers. Shorty stands in the center of the room, bare-chested and wearing a tightly tied blue Speedo for underwear, so it can't be ripped from his body during the game. He pulls on a black armband and starts talking. "Let's get your mind on the fucking game, mates...what you're going to do, where you're going to be. Talk to the bloke lined up inside you. Fuckin' talk, boys."

The boys steal glances at one another, at Shorty standing stock-straight, radiating fearlessness. He's been hit so many times he sometimes speaks laughingly about reaching that weird calm before crossing over into unconsciousness where everything is just "shades of green." But this is the time when the boys enter a vacuum, forgetting everything but one another. Because really all they have now are one another. The bloke taping his ankle or getting a quick rubdown or barking in the locker room may be the one who makes the tackle after your miss or takes your pitch ten more yards down the field. He's the one, when you go down, who fills your spot, making the Dolphins a kind of stitched-together family, one that lives forever by replacement.

The Chief's speech is short and sweet. "Fuck this squad," he says. "They humiliated us last year. Not again."

In real life, almost a fifth of the boys are plumbers. Some are carpenters and drywallers. Six days a week, they are responsible citizens, fixing people's toilets, building the spacious rooms where others will live. Many are just getting by. In a sport handed from father to son, brother to brother, mate to mate, they live their lives, do their weekly hard labor on the rock pile, and on game day, when they walk on the footie oval, it all disappears in an adrenaline rush.

Today the boys come out wobbly, though. The heat, the bright, unrelenting country light, the crowd, the sudden speed of things. They instantly turn the ball over deep in their own territory, and the Magpies convert by rolling across the touchline, then adding the kick, and like that, it's 6–0.

After the opening minutes, the Dolphins settle in. They make a stand, recover the ball, then start down the field the opposite way, the footie revolving in spiraled pitches from player to player, out to the wing and back. It's a beautiful sight, the white ball flashing over the green expanse, the sudden hole that opens as Brock passes off to John Bailey—the oldest-looking 23-year-old on the planet—and Bailes becomes two heels madly kicking up sod until he's dragged down near the Magpies' goal. The ball gets passed out to the Palm—a bloke from England named Matt, who's come along this year after a serious knee operation—and he dives over the touchline. The boys converge for a brief celebration; the kick is good; the score is knotted at 6.

For the rest of the game, the Magpies and Dolphins are two evenly matched clubs, marching up and down the field. There's the usual allotment of stray fists and clandestine cheap shots, and by the third quarter, the Magpies slip ahead 16 to 10. But the Dolphins keep pressing. The boys drive down the field until they're lined up ten yards from the Magpie goal line. And suddenly the game gets called. Called early, with no warning and no fourth quarter, because the memorial is about to interfere with the scheduled start of the professional game, for which the stadium is now packed.

If it weren't a memorial, the boys might go down with a riot. As it is, the anger dissipates when the local press comes round for interviews again—the inevitable questions about what this game means and carrying on, and Brock does most of the reluctant talking because he's the captain and lost his brother Clint. Afterward, the team gathers one last time on the field. The Chief's postgame speech is brief. "Look, boys, we worked hard today. We had a good go. It's something to build on." He wipes a hand over his mouth, smiling for the first time all day. "And since we got fucked, let's go have a good time!"

The team lets out a cheer, gathers up its stuff, and starts toward the bus. Which is when the lightheartedness returns—relief and fatigue and that after-footie feeling of smashed-up satisfaction. And there's another feeling, too, which is more complicated and less conscious, something revealed—is it apprehension or sadness?—in the way the boys keep looking back to watch the professionals take the field that once belonged to them. They mark the field one more time before reentering the real world, before time begins again.

There was music, gerard, and the boys were on the patio joking. The van stalled and then exploded, thirty yards from where they sat. And where were you?

Back at the Bounty, in his hotel room, Shorty was jolted awake, noticed the electricity flicker, and thinking it was a blown generator, passed right back out. Ellie and Keffo, in their rooms, did the same. After dropping Ellie off at the Bounty, Erik had started back down the lane, a big, affable, curly-haired man with a Jungle Juice smile on his face, lumbering toward the Sari Club when all the shops and streetlights suddenly shut off, too. The music garbled to a stop, and for a moment everything was still. And then it all lurched forward again. The lights came up, and the music again. At first nothing seemed wrong, except now there was a huge fireball above where the Sari Club once stood, and haloed over it, a white mushroom cloud. And there was a completely foreign sound: high-pitched screaming. People were screaming.

Erik pushed down the lane toward the club, against a wave of fleeing humans, passing faces that went from looking surprised to panicked, bodies that went from scratches and bruises to blood and gaping wounds, and finally those who weren't wearing any clothes at all. Around the corner, the thatched roof of the Sari was crackling with fire so intense it seemed to hover like a molten cloud, raining embers. The lucky ones ran from the ruined club in flames; some escaped carrying their own severed limbs. One man ran free on two stubs for legs, yelling ecstatically, and died in the street, everything reduced to its most violent animal reality.

As for Patty, he'd left the Sari Club sixty seconds before the bomb exploded, unaware that any of his mates had gone before him. Some instinct had told him to get out before another drink was forced into his hand. Of the many incomprehensible moments that night, this is one that makes the least sense: Patty, the driving force to get to the Sari, left one brief sweep of a clock hand before its total destruction.

And so he was among the first on the scene, pulling several badly burned people out, the skin of one peeling off in his own hands. The worst among the victims were put on the backs of motorbikes or laid in taxis and taken straight to the hospital in Denpasar, a place so unprepared for disaster that there were almost no body bags on hand. When the heat from the fire became too intense, Patty and the other rescuers—most of them Australian—were forced back to the curb. And that is the exact image that appeared on the cover of the next day's issue of The Sydney Morning Herald: Patty Byrne, a rugby player for the Coogee Dolphins, standing among the wreckage, shielding his eyes from the blaze, convinced that all of his mates were dead.

In the chaos, searching for their teammates, Patty missed Erik and Erik missed Patty. Hours later, Patty returned to the Bounty and went back to his room, the one he was sharing with Shorty. He tried to slow his mind or turn it off or enter its other side but was left only with a realization: This is actually happening. And yet when he opened the door and made out a Shorty-size lump in bed, he was momentarily filled with joy, screaming, "You're alive! You're alive!" Shorty, who was still very drunk, emerged groggily from under layers of sleep to find Patty on top of him, hugging him, and Shorty thought it was a joke at first.

"Okay, mate, enough," said Shorty. "Let's go to sleep."

"They're all dead," Patty stuttered. He manically described it to Shorty—how he'd pulled bodies out, how he'd held the shawl of someone's skin in his hands—and Shorty, not entirely absorbing, as if hearing a made-up story, said, "There's nothing to be done right now but get a bit of sleep. We'll go looking at dawn."

Gerard, can you remember before all of this? Can you recall growing up, surrounded by one hundred cousins and family members in Dubbo, that dusty country town, and making the momentous decision to leave it all behind, leave your people and your job at the slaughterhouse, you the sixth of eight children—four boys and four girls—moving away from your parents to live with your brother Paul, to work as an apprentice in his plumbing company? Do you recall the excitement, nervousness, and loneliness of being in a big city, learning a trade, and coming out for the Dolphins, of falling in with new mates who were, by the third week, old mates? Do you know how it made your brother Paul feel, in the middle of a game, to look out on the wing and see you, his brother, coltish and jumpy, waiting on the footie?

Thirteen months before the bombing, in September 2001, you went to a plumbing job with Paul, arriving in the truck on Jersey Street, but then just sat there, listening to the radio. It was time to work, but you and Paul sat listening to live reports as they streamed through the air directly from New York City. The voices told a story of two jetliners crashing into skyscrapers and those skyscrapers falling to the ground, crushing thousands. And the voices told of the frantic search for bodies.

You sat for a half hour—and then more. Couldn't move. It may be that you've forgotten, but Paul can't forget, pores over this moment all the time now. He can't seem to shake the image of you, Pancake, his baby brother, sitting two feet away, the both of you marveling at the perversity and mayhem of the faraway world while stowed on a protected leafy street in Sydney, Australia.

Do you know why Paul can't forget this moment? He can't forget because in the instant that those buildings fell to the ground, in the instant that the two of you sat together listening, some bony finger was already slipping round your arm. You were being stolen. And he can't forget because he didn't see it—the world—coming to claim you, his baby brother, his son. He can't forget because he blames himself, as if in that moment he should have grabbed on and held you tight until the hand moved from New York to Bali, and from Bali to Madrid—and moved elsewhere again, as it is moving at this very moment. If it were possible, he'd still be holding on now, until the two of you were old men with no memory of life but the carefulness of a leafy street.

Sometime near dawn the counting game began. Erik had returned and gone knocking at all the doors, woke Ellie, Keffo, Patty, and Shorty. Got keys to the other rooms, but no: five alive and six missing. The images of the Sari Club were already beaming to the world—raw, uncensored footage of charred bodies soon to putrefy in the heat. The hospital wards were filling with the injured.

In Shorty and Patty's room, the phone began pealing off the hook. Gerard, your brother Paul was one of the first to ring. Shorty told him that you hadn't shown yet but that the boys were hoping to find you, perhaps over at the hospital, alive. Before hanging up, your brother had a feeling that perhaps you were dead, that maybe one of the boys had already seen your body. He said to Shorty, "Mate, you're not holding out on me, are you?"

And this is when Shorty knew it was real. "No, mate," he said, "I'd never do that. When we find Gerard, you'll be the first to know."

So Shorty, Patty, and Erik corralled a taxi to the main hospital in Denpasar. On the open roads, it could have been any other day: families riding four to a moped, lorries filled with bananas, visions of pretty Balinese girls. The perversity of the sun was that it shone the way it always did, but hotter; the mockery of jasmine was that it smelled more fragrant. The Balinese dreamworld streamed along. Where were all of these expressionless people going?

The boys worked their way to the morgue, and when they arrived, there was no one at the door to stop them. The walls were a toothpaste green, the stench of burnt flesh overwhelming. Inside, a mountain of skin grew in the corner; nearby was a pile of arms and legs; blood glazed the floor. Upon seeing the first bodies, Patty turned and walked out, simply overcome.

Shorty, too, felt overwhelmed—the morgue was hot and claustrophobic—but everyone was now trapped in their own small role of the drama, only asked to do what they might or were able or could try. Patty had pulled people from the club, had saved lives—and he was done. There were other people packing their bags and leaving on the first flights home; some were pacing in hotel rooms, melting down with fear; and then there were those coming on planes from Sydney, as reinforcements to help in the search. And here was Shorty not knowing if he could, Gerard.

For Shorty has spent a life wondering who he is—and what he's made of. His adopted parents named him Anthony, but he never felt that he fit that name, nor the parents who put it on him. By the time he decided to go in search of his birth mother, he was 26. He found her contact information on a nationwide list: She was looking for him, too. But when he called, he discovered that he was three years late. A heavy smoker, she'd died of cancer in her forties. There was no teary reunion, just a visit to her grave. With his father long out of the picture, he met his grandparents, and they gave him his mother's wedding ring. He rechristened himself Daniel Mortensen, the name he was given at birth. And that afternoon, maybe eight hours before the bombing, he bought a silver chain, then slipped her ring on it and placed it round his neck.

And here he was now, alive, trying to work up the courage, trying not to fall apart, Paul's voice in his head, Mate, you're not holding out on me, are you? And his own in response, Mate, you'll be the first to know. Shorty began looking under sheets. Meanwhile, Erik had gone straight for the refrigeration unit and started pulling out drawer after drawer. The problem was that the bodies were placed the wrong way, so he was forced to pull the heavy drawers all the way out in order to see whose feet, hips, torso, and then head he was looking at. Open, shut, open, shut, again and again—and nobody looked good.

Without warning, Shorty came face-to-face with the woman, the glamour in the lane whom he'd passed the night before as she headed to the Sari Club. That same beautiful woman. Had he been half a drink less drunk, he might easily have been standing next to her when the bomb went off. Who knew, in a moment like this, that they weren't meant to have been together for a night or a life? And what grief she deserved now, he couldn't give her.

The first pass through the morgue turned up nothing. The people here had died two kinds of deaths: The ones at the front of the club had died almost instantaneously, from the shock wave of the bomb that crushed the air from their lungs. Some looked as if sleep had overtaken them in midsentence or midlaugh. The others, who had been deeper in the club, were less lucky: These were the badly burned or impaled, unspeakable agony etched on each face.

Every few hours a new group of dead was brought in, and each time there was that putrid smell of flesh and blood, the green paint, the growing number of unattended bodies stretched down an open-air hallway, out in the courtyard, with more and more Balinese sitting on the high walls, looking down. What were they looking at? What?

On one pass, as Erik went along a row of bodies at their heads and Shorty at their feet, Shorty found himself staring at a body he'd already examined more than once, one covered with grime and dirt, like a guy who'd played footie on a very muddy field. Shorty was walking along at his feet and looking at his feet, and his mind was flowing over the missing boys—flowing over the memories of their living bodies to try to make a match—and he found himself thinking, It's Josh's feet. They're his feet. And turned to Erik and said, "Man, these are Josh's feet....This is Josh!"

And it was. Under the dirt of the body's arm was a tribal tattoo, which Shorty immediately recognized from the twilight practices at the oval, from being mates. Assuming that the boys had died together—and were brought here together—and realizing, too, what they were going to look like now, which was nothing at all the way they'd looked alive, Shorty and Erik checked the bodies on either side of Josh and came upon Clint, with his tattoo of the cartoon character, Sonic the Hedgehog. Soon enough, Dave and Adam turned up, too—and later, out in a refrigerated truck used to haul fish but now holding bodies, was Shane.

It was a shock and a relief, at once. A weird empty feeling filled partially by having at least accomplished something, as dark as that something was. But still, that only made five. And then, Gerard, the hunt was on for you.

Joy to the world on a Saturday night in Wagga Wagga! Praise be to the mighty Dolphins, a team that shoulda won, had there been a fourth quarter! Hail to this band of mates, this drinking team with a footie problem, with no sense of time or the future but living for now! The clogged toilets and unbuilt houses of Monday morning may as well be light-years away.

The Magpies throw a reception at their clubhouse, with hot finger foods and a vast picture window that looks out on the oval where the professionals now play. The father of Dave Mavroudis stands to make a speech, to commemorate his son—and breaks down halfway through. Watching him, Shorty swallows hard, as do many of the other boys. It's funny how the memory is always one unfinished sentence away, how one hole punched in the fabric of a perfect evening allows the quasars to stream back through again.

For weeks after the bombing and through all six memorial services, the boys were on the piss. Many of them stopped going to work altogether and simply got up in the morning and went straight to the Palace for beers. Shorty started sleeping with the television on, reflective light thrown over him like a sheet. Brock, Clint's brother, was roughly 16–0 in barroom brawls, and God forbid if you were the poor stump who backed into him at the Palace and muttered the wrong word. He'd have you on your back in three pile drivers, and then all of his bottled grief and rage would rain down, not until you were beaten but until Brock was through with you. "Does it make you feel better?" one of the blokes asked. "Yeah," Brock said. "I really think it does."

After the reception, the boys spread out downtown, filter from bar to bar, drink to drink, like abandoned kids on weekend release from reform school. There's a pattern to being on the piss: It tastes almost necessary at first, both to quench the deep thirst and the dull throb of having played. That goodness, that coldness, carries you through the first half dozen or so, which makes you happy and want more. The next half is an easy escalation, because it's not taste so much anymore as where the drunk is leading you. It's automatic drinking. And then each lager after the twelfth is simply consumed, not out of need but for the mates, with the mates, because of the mates. It may not make sense, this footie excess, but it's how the boys get to the other side, how they go from orange rock and dry gully to wide-open sky. It's how they throw themselves free.

Yes, the boys know that there's another life out there beyond theirs, a life that belongs to the people whose toilets they unclog, who seem to have comforts that may never belong to them. But then, there's another world, too: the spirit world or heaven or whatever you want to call it, where everyone is equal. There's a God, or maybe there isn't. But there are ghosts like you, Gerard, who appear and disappear. It's something rarely if ever discussed among the mates, but that doesn't mean the boys don't wonder or care. That doesn't mean they aren't looking for signs at every turn. Or salvation.

By midnight, the Coogee Dolphins have achieved escape velocity. At a club, some of the boys dance, with or without women. Bucko starts bouncing as if in his own personal mosh pit. Stocky works overtime with the ladies. But most stick with one another, orbiting together, overjoyed to bump into more orbiting blokes until they are the Dolphins again, reconfigured in their casual clothes.

The next morning, at the prearranged meeting time in the hotel lobby bar, Reg, a redhead sporting a shiner, sits with a schooner in hand—still, inexplicably, in his Dolphins uniform. He's been up all night, and when the coach appears, Reg yells across the bar: "Chief, I'm ready for that fourth quarter now!" He turns to the team, impersonating Chief, wild-eyed. "Boys—they're walking all over us, boys! We've worked too bloody hard! I don't care if it's 124 degrees out here. Let's fire up, boys!"

While the ride out took five hours, the ride home is ten. No country pub or bottle shop goes unvisited. With each passing hour and mile, with each new case of beer, the boys regress. Kev gets a wedgie; the whole bus moons passing vehicles. Stuck in traffic on the highway, the boys strip naked and start out of the bus for a nudie run until a cop is spotted and the boys go in quick reverse. As the bus passes back into the halogen glow of Sydney on a Sunday night, where does this thirty-hour drinking binge get the Coogee Dolphins? Sauced, pickled, and lathered, of course—but more. It gets them pig-piling on Kev and telling stories and laughing at no one else's expense but their own. It gets them time together, and to a place beyond memory, arms around shoulders: Mates.

Where does it get the boys? Eventually, it gets them home.

In the room at the Bounty, nearly seventy empty bottles of beer were piled like miniature skyscrapers, a glasswork city set on the bedstands and desk, on the back of the toilet and along the edge of the bathtub. It looked almost like art. And more were consumed to dull the pain, though the more that was drunk the less drunk everyone became. Patty seemed all right one minute and then would suddenly burst into tears, softly pleading, "God, I'm freaking out here." His brother and his best mate—Jason and Cocko—arrived on the first flight from Sydney, and though Patty wasn't a smoker, they found him in the room chain-smoking, pacing, as jittery as if he were being hunted.

Soon, Gerard, your brother Paul arrived, along with two of your sisters and a brother-in-law. The new arrivals went with Shorty and Erik to the morgue, and together they examined every decent body, every body part, every arm, every leg, trying to find something that was you. If it looked like your watch or a necklace you might have bought at a geegaw shop on the lane, someone affid a tag that read: Gerard Yeo?

The search had become an endurance event. When Shorty needed inspiration, he called upon a memory of his best mate among the dead, Adam Howard. What Adam had lacked as a footie player, he'd made up for in raw determination. When at the end of a close game Shorty had gone to block down a kick, Adam, who instinctively moved to cover his position, had yelled, "Go with your life, mate!" And for some reason, digging through each new pile of bodies, looking for you, that was what echoed now: Go with your life.

And yet there was still that smell and shades of green and the Balinese still perched on the high wall at the morgue. What were they staring at it? What?

It seems now it wasn't the dead that they ogled, or the whole macabre spectacle. It was the living. They were watching us: the desperation of disbelief, the steadfast refusal of the searchers to accept the irreversible flow of the universe, as if by finding your body and bringing you home, Gerard, by letting you lie in peace awhile and recover your senses, you'd simply get up and carry on, as if from a nap.

Perched on that wall, the Balinese were watching the souls flicker skyward, and down below everyone else was holding on to what little remained, trying to call the souls back.

You still don't know what happened, do you, Gerard? It was a Saturday night in October on the island of Bali at just after 11 p.m., and—click—you were living it, your Garuda. You had a belly full of grub and were on your way somewhere, roaming to have a pee or to watch the dancing. Patty was the last one to speak to you, seconds before he left the bar. Had an arm around you. Mates.

Seconds later, you were caught in the full force of the bomb, probably had no idea what hit you. But the thing is, you weren't ready to leave yet—not the Sari Club, not your friends, and certainly not your family. Within hours of the blast, you appeared at the farmhouse of your eldest sister, in the blighted Australian outback. It was moonless; the sheep were in the yard. She was sleeping, alone in the big bed—her husband, Lou, was working down at the pub to pick up a few extra bucks—and you entered the room, stood near the door, and said: "We're all right."

But you were not all right, Gerard: You were already dead. Your sister woke and said, "Lou? Did you get home from the pub early?" Then she fell back to sleep. And then the next thing, Lou got home at three, and she woke again, knowing nothing of Bali and the bomb, and said, "Gerard's been here."

She wasn't alone. Shorty saw you in a dream, too, where you laid your hand on his shoulder and said it again: "The boys and I are all right."

In the weeks after the blast, the Balinese were convinced the spirits were everywhere in Kuta. Some spirits hailed cabs on Jalan Legian, gave instructions on where to go, and then, halfway there, vanished; others returned to their hotel rooms to brush their teeth and shave. At the Bounty, the staff refused to go to the back rooms of the hotel, the rooms where you and the boys had stayed, Gerard. Because you were there.

And then came the miracle. Two months after your death, your brother Paul and his wife, Judi, rushed to the hospital to have their baby, but there were complications. After eighteen hours of labor, the baby appeared, born but not breathing. A midwife herself, Judi immediately sensed a problem. After losing you, it's hard to describe the expectation placed on this moment, and harder still to describe how quickly that expectation seemed now to turn to ash. Seven minutes...eight, nine, ten minutes. No breath, with pale skin and knotted hands, lifeless at ten minutes. Judi began to weep softly. A specialist burst into the room. "We have to move. Let's go!" The baby was put in a trolley, a panicky horde of doctors began to rush from the room, and Paul, watching it all slip away, not thinking but just reacting, looked up skyward and screamed: "C'MON, GERARD! C'MON, PANCAKE!"

He yelled so loudly, with such a primal bellow, that he literally, for that one moment, stopped time, scaring the shit out of everyone in the room—even the baby itself, who, on cue, let out a huge cry and began sucking air. Ten minutes without oxygen, but 100 percent after that. A perfect boy they named Joseph but call Gerard.

You know, Paul doesn't want to be sad forever, and yet he can't shake a recurring image of you trapped in the grave. "I sometimes picture him in there, banging and singing a Christmas song, wanting to get out," Paul recently told one of the blokes, with that familiar wince. "But these are quite unreal things, aren't they?"

They are and they aren't. As stubbornly as you cling to the living world, you need to understand this one thing, Gerard: You were roaming when the bomb exploded, and you were blown apart. The boys couldn't find you—not Shorty, not Paul, no one could—until DNA testing turned up your remains, or the pieces of you. You were blown into stars and planets. And these were eventually sent home to Dubbo and laid in the ground.

And there's something else you need to know. Your presence, at first, your signs and miracles, these were necessary for a while because, for a while, no one could imagine living without you. But then, your family, your mates, the Dolphins—they had to. They had to, Gerard. You came to comfort the living—or maybe you came to say sorry. Sorry for not sticking with your blokes, sorry for breaking your contract with Paul.

Click, you're forgiven.

Down at coogee Beach, a promontory sticks out into the Pacific, a headland that was recently renamed Dolphins Point in honor of the dead. The town fathers raised a bronze plaque out there with the six names etched on it—and fourteen others who died from the Coogee area—and about thirty feet away, up on the hill, a famous artist made a sculpture of what looks to be oversize arms coming out of the ground. Some say it reminds them of a footie scrum, and others think it looks like dolphins when they stand up in the water and go backward. Everyone believes it's bloody nice for something they wish didn't exist at all.

The boys come out here from time to time. The beach spreads to the south in a half-moon of deep white sand. People lie in the sun and go surfing, and the rocks at the point form a protected pool and catch fire at sundown. If you take the stairs to the water and slip in, float on your back and feel the tide sucking in and out like breath, there are moments when it's possible to forget, Gerard, when your body opens up and you become part of the current that runs from here to Antarctica, merely one seaweed strand of life with no capacity to think about its mystery anymore.

That's what the boys have tried to do: not think anymore. Or they're trying to remember and forget at the same time.

In the two years since the bombing, there are still days when your brother Paul struggles to get out of bed, to put one foot over the side to reach the ground. When he wants to be close to you, he heads to Dolphins Point. He runs a finger over your engraved name in the memorial wall there, sometimes affis a laminated letter to you. Takes a moment to breathe.

There are days, too, when Patty relives it all, spiraling with all the futile questions: What if he'd let the boys stay at the restaurant for dessert? What if they'd started for the Sari Club at eleven instead? What if he'd been delayed one more minute before leaving? Then perhaps he wouldn't now suffer the terrible weight of having survived.

A few months ago, Shorty went back to Bali. When he got to the Bounty, he threw his backpack in his room, made a beeline for the pool bar, and pulled his all-nighter fueled by bourbon. The next day, he returned to the morgue, so that in his mind he could fix an image of it empty in order to counteract all the images—and nightmares—of it full. If he ever had cause to doubt his origins, he doesn't now. If called on in the worst of human moments to stand up, he's the kind who will stand up.

For the rest of the Dolphins, there are good days and bad days, drunken days and violent days and days when a bloke feels completely alone and passed by. And there are these rare days, too, when the world goes back, for one fleeting moment, to what it was before the bombings. These are the days when the Coogee Dolphins tape up their aching joints and the adrenaline soars, when they lace their cleats and convince themselves that they're invincible again.

It's these days, Gerard, when the mind can play a trick, and somewhere late in the game, in the thick of the action, the boys may look out on the wing and imagine it's you again, waiting your go. Can you remember this feeling, Gerard, the best feeling in the world, of waiting as the ball is pitched out from one bloke to the next, spiraling through space until each new pair of hands latches on, and then passes it again—waves of men crashing against each other, canceling one another—and the ball floating into your hands with nothing but open field in front? Do you remember that feeling and your body moving at full speed, pressing to escape the flesh?

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